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IRAQI CITIZENS

Like many others, I was intrigued by the attention the film “American Sniper” was getting. I knew I was treading murky waters, but I decided to follow the herd and see the movie. Unlike most people in the crowd, I had a very personal stake in the film. “American Sniper” takes place in Iraq, my homeland, which I left shortly after the American-led invasion that Chris Kyle took part in. So the film, powerful and sad, left me with mixed thoughts and reminiscences.

Falluja — where much of the movie takes place — was, for American troops, a city of demons and horror. But before the 2003 invasion, during the years of the embargo against Iraq, Falluja was known as little more than a transit hub frequented by travelers heading to the western border with Jordan – as well as for its tasty kebab. Three days before the invasion, a group of five teenagers from Baghdad, my son among them, drove there after midnight for a late meal. It was the norm. Nobody was hurt.

When I was back in Baghdad in 2010, I found that my skills on the very roads where I had learned to drive were no longer viable because of traffic jams caused by checkpoints and blast walls. I had to be transported around by a cast of fearful drivers. One driver, Sa’ad, told me quietly one day, “I cannot serve you tomorrow.” When I asked why, he replied that he had to go to Hilla — about 70 miles south of Baghdad — to bring the children of his dead brother to their grandmother’s home. His eyes were teary.

In 2006, his brother, he and a cousin were in a car that broke down near an American base. While the three were leaning under the car’s hood, trying to fix the engine, someone – perhaps an American sniper – shot and killed the brother and cousin. Shielded from the sniper’s sight by the car, Sa’ad was spared.

“His head was on the radiator, and I was too scared to do anything,” Sa’ad said, sobbing. After the killing of her husband, Sa’ad’s sister-in-law moved with her children to her parents’ house in Hilla.

Then I remembered attending a doctor’s funeral in Amman in 2006. He had been shot in the head, apparently by an American soldier, while driving home from his clinic in Baghdad. The air conditioning was on in his car at the time, so he did not hear orders to stop. The doctor was 62. “We are very sorry,” his wife said the Americans told her son afterward. “Sorry will not bring him back,” she said, crying.

Sa’ad must have noticed my distraught face as he told me about his brother. “Sniper attacks, as much as they feel personal and painful, are a trivial fraction of the war,” he said. “What if I tell you about the victims of random killings, mortar attacks, raids, crossfires and explosions.” Since Sa’ad is the paternal uncle, he is obligated to support his late brother’s family.

“We leave it to God, the greatest avenger,” he said.

In the movie, I could not understand the connection between Iraq and 9/11 for people like Chris Kyle. Like many people in Iraq, I had not heard of Al Qaeda until the United States was attacked that day, even though I was working as a press officer at a European embassy.

On July 19, 2003, my daughter, son and I left Baghdad. Baghdad International Airport was under the control of the United States military, and it was allowing it to be used only for military purposes. So Iraqis had to make the 10-hour drive to Amman. At the border, an American soldier stood guard. He was barely 18, pimples filling his ruddy baby face.

“I just want to speak with someone,” he said, popping his head into our passenger-side window. “I have not spoken with anyone for a week now.”

I felt sorry for him, a stranger in this desert. I wondered out loud what had brought him here. He said he was trying to pay for college.

About 4,500 American soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis lost their lives to this war, not to mention those who were left with long-term disabilities. The Iraqi diaspora caused by the American-led invasion is among the largest in modern history. The first question Iraqis who were in Iraq in 2003 ask one another when connecting on social media is: “Which country are you in?” No family has been left untouched.

You might think that, after all these years and after all the tears and changes of jobs, cities, countries and even nationalities, I would have become desensitized to the war. But the movie made me realize that I am not. Evidently, the scars of those days will remain with me forever.

Yasmine Mousa is an Iraqi-Canadian journalist who left Iraq in 2003. She is also a certified translator and interpreter.

A summer sand storm in the Iraqi province of Nineveh.Credit Blake Rice

Six months ago, a suicide bomber killed 13 children at a school playground in Qabak, Iraq, a town near Tal Afar in the northern province of Nineveh. I was dismayed to read the news. My platoon visited Qabak often during our deployment in 2009. It was quiet then. Iraq, we thought, had finally achieved a tentative peace.

What I remember from that country is not the violence but my encounters with Iraqis: curious children who moved in small bands; idle men with their questioning stares; and, most clearly of all, village elders — the elders of Nineveh.

The first elder I met was at least 80 years old, although it was hard to tell and he wasn’t sure himself. He had seen a king in power before the dictatorship.

“We view you as occupiers,” he said. “There was order under Saddam. The military was respected. Now the army has no standards. They recruit anyone.”

His family prepared a feast to welcome us Marines to his village. We sat cross-legged on a blue plastic tarp around a mountain of rice served on a large silver platter. He reached for the best pieces of chicken and placed them against my knees on the dish we shared.

The elders stood on ritual. Over tea (dark, with lots of sugar), they asked questions about America, launching a conversation that could last for hours. Most questions were about family. Was I married? How many children did I have? I explained that most Americans don’t get married until they’re well into their twenties.

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Chatting with the elders of a small village near Tal Afar.Credit Blake Rice

In the wealthier villages, they served bitter coffee with the consistency of tar. The poorest villages had neither tea nor coffee, just a bowl of water from the well. I drank from the bowl and passed it to my neighbor.

Most patrols ended with an evening visit to the elder’s compound. While Marines stood watch outside, I would remove my protective gear — helmet, ballistic glasses, body armor with thick ceramic plates — and set it with my weapon against the wall of a meeting room often furnished with little more than a few cushions and a carpet to cover the earthen floor.

There were directives against removing gear but Iraqis considered it rude to keep it on. It left them with the impression that the elders were somehow untrustworthy. And Arab hospitality is considered sacred; no harm will come to a guest once he has passed the threshold of a home.

On one visit, the elder and I sat on his best carpet, illuminated by a flickering oil lamp that cast long shadows into obscured corners of the meeting room. Villagers gathered around us, the children smiling at my broken Arabic.

He told me the story of an American convoy that had passed near the village some time before. One of the lumbering trucks had drifted from the road and flattened a farm tool. He and I walked down a dirt path in the dim twilight to inspect the damage. At the end of the path on the edge of a barren field abutting the only paved road for miles around, the elder pointed to a crudely welded tiller with a harness for draft animals. The tiller was damaged beyond repair.

I asked him if anyone from the convoy had stopped. He said he wasn’t sure. The convoys traveled at night. No one saw the damage until morning.

I took the elder’s name and promised I would submit an official claim card for damages due. He did not want the money, he said. He was just happy to speak to an American about the damage. But he took the dinar when I came back with our battalion’s public affairs officer.

For most of our deployment, we in the platoon lived like nomads. At night we drove into the hills, away from the towns and villages, and placed our vehicles in a wide circle at 90-degree increments. Coiling up, we called it.

During midnight watches, standing alone in the turret while Marines slept in filthy sleeping bags on the ground below, I often heard faint voices in the static between radio checks. At daybreak, we awoke to the sound of the call to prayer drifting up from a mosque in one of the villages.

In Mir Qasim, I met Mohammad Shafiq, a 32-year veteran of the Iraqi Army. Mir Qasim was a prosperous village until drought turned its green hills brown. Most of the villagers moved away when the rains stopped. The rain left behind a brackish well, tucked into a fold of the landscape, that Mr. Shafiq used to tend to a vegetable garden.

He offered me a breakfast of flatbread and yogurt with honey.

While we drank tea in the shade on a stone terrace in front of his home, a few of the Marines helped the village children attach a new rope above the well to replace the worn length of strand, which lowered jugs a hundred feet into the water.

In Saddam’s army, Mr. Shafiq had been a warrant officer of the air defense corps, he said, tasked during the 1991 Persian Gulf War with staging what was a hopeless defense against American stealth bombers.

I remembered the coverage on CNN: Wolf Blitzer extolling the virtues of our superior technology. I was 10-years-old then and it had all seemed like a game. None of our guys got hurt. But now I pictured my host and his men dying in flashes of light, confused and impotent.

He brought up the hardships of military life, of being away from home. “Does your family miss you?” he asked.

“Yes, very much,” I replied. Every knock at the door must have been a small torture for my mother, who feared the worst and didn’t hear from me for weeks at a time.

Mr. Shafiq and I discussed our training.

“How much did you carry in your packs?” he asked.

I couldn’t remember. “A lot,” I replied.

When he was a young recruit he’d carried 90 pounds of stones in his, he said.

In the months that followed the invasion of 2003, Mr. Shafiq was dishonorably discharged and labeled a loyalist to the fallen regime. After three decades of faithful service, he resented the provisional government for disowning him and many of his comrades.

He refused to let his sons join the new army, even though there were no other jobs.

“Why did you disband the army?” he asked. “It was our strongest institution. Many of its officers were against Saddam. They were waiting for a chance to build a new Iraq. Instead, they joined the insurgency.”

I thought and offered, “Wasn’t it more complicated than that?”

He laughed. “We lived in peace for generations,” Mr. Shafiq said. “I am Sunni and have a Shia wife. My second wife is Sunni. If I take a third wife, I would like to marry a Christian.”

We climbed a steep hill, following the outline of an eroded stone wall. In biblical times, a fort stood atop the hill, holding sway over the villages below. I could see for miles in all directions — a vast, empty country. There were many more settlements back then, he explained. The wall curved back toward the village.

The Marines showed the children how to coil the new well rope so that it would not fray. Mr. Shafiq offered the Marines cigarettes. He insisted I stay for lunch, but I received a radio call that there had been an attack on a police outpost. I promised we would visit again.

In July and August, sand storms swept across our corner of Iraq, gathering strength over hundreds of miles of open desert, like hurricanes over the Atlantic. On the horizon a brown wave appeared. Very quickly the wave was upon us and visibility was zero. There was nothing to do but coil up and seal the hatches of our vehicles against the flying sand.

After one especially long storm, the platoon was granted a reprieve from the field: two days of rest inside a large Army base 100 miles away. For the first time in weeks, we could let our guards down. Someone else was on watch.

It was odd to spend the night indoors on a mattress in the neatly ordered rows of air-conditioned trailers, so much so that I couldn’t sleep.

I sat on the edge of my bunk, writing emails from a laptop I kept sealed in a water-proof bag under the ammo cans in my vehicle. I wrote to a woman I had met in the months before deployment. But she hadn’t written back and I guessed that my chances of seeing her again were slim.

Earlier that night I had called my mother. Her voice broke at the end of my allotted 10 minutes. I shouldn’t have called, I thought.

On the bunk above mine, our platoon sergeant was snoring loudly in reply to the air conditioner’s drone. He was on his fourth consecutive deployment and had seen the worst of the violence. Judging from the news, his memories of Iraq from those dark years were closer to today’s reality than mine.

Blake Rice served in the Marines as an infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the co-founder of District Line Partners, an investment fund in Washington, D.C.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of heavily armed paratroopers, I looked around at all of us, breathing heavily, angry and resentful, surrounding the Baya mosque in Baghdad. The previous morning, we had arrested the head imam because he was stockpiling weapons in the mosque. Now, under amber street lamps casting wicked shadows, his followers were gathered, demanding his release. My adrenaline was still pumping from the explosion minutes earlier, when one of them tossed a grenade at our line of troops, injuring more than a half-dozen soldiers and civilians. After that, order descended into a running street battle, soldiers wrestling protesters, bodies slamming into the hard concrete. Months of pent-up aggression were suddenly released in a cathartic, chaotic performance.

After that initial fit of violence, things were calming down. We had them surrounded, cornered, their backs to the mosque. Sweat ran down from under my helmet and into my eyes as I struggled to make out the mass of bodies in front of me, searching for a gleam of metal, the shine of a worn-out AK-47. They chanted at us: “America equals Saddam” and “Down down, U.S.A.!”

Imams with dark beards and large black turbans walked among the protesters, handing out bread and tea as our sergeants trooped the line in front of us, yelling and ensuring that we were packed tight next to one another like a Roman phalanx.

Behind us I could hear the rumble of Humvees and tanks, their guns canted over our heads, seemingly trained toward the dome and minaret of the mosque. Above us two helicopters circled, buzzing low, shining their industrial-strength spotlights on the crowd of protesting Iraqis. Hundreds of troops, tanks, Humvees and helicopters. All of this American firepower, focused on the people and the building in front of us, the mosque.

The situation was tense. One panicky soldier, one itchy trigger finger, and there would be a massacre. I was scared.

Off to my right I saw a squad of American soldiers turn to chase someone into an alley, loudly knocking over some garbage cans and startling us all. I laughed nervously and turned to the soldier next to me and said, “I know we’re not at war with Islam, but if someone took a picture right now. …”

That was Oct. 7, 2003. That was the day that the war ended for me.

I was there for the invasion when it was about finding illicit weapons and taking out Mr. Hussein and going home. I was sure that I would be home in time for burgers and fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The summer passed, and I was still there. Hot, miserable and not understanding what I was doing anymore. The insurgency began. We started getting hit more and more frequently. The looks from Iraqis on the street became darker and darker. I could no longer disarm anyone with a smile.

I’ve told this story a hundred times, refining it and polishing it and punching it up. It’s just as true as any war story ever was. It is the story I think about the most. It’s the thing I think about when I think about where it went wrong, where it ended or where it began to end. After that night, the war was never the same. The cool demeanor I prided myself on before was gone, replaced instead with a semi-panicky hypervigilance. I was a soldier determined to get home.

I cringed a little harder when we drove down the bomb-laden streets. When the platoon leader asked for volunteers, I looked around to see if anyone else would raise his hand first. My eyes flicked nonstop to every window we passed, every rooftop. My default reaction to anything I heard from anyone was distrust.

I was sadder when I called home.

Shortly after the protest, we moved from our small, company-size firebase to a new, megaforward operating base, complete with its own dining facility, dormitories, air-conditioning and showers. It was a welcome and wonderful change of pace from the spartan conditions we had endured since deploying earlier in the year.

The riot at the Baya mosque coupled with the move to the F.O.B. marked the beginning of the end of the war for me. I barely felt it then — just a deep-inside, tingling concern about what we were doing. I didn’t know what it was; I just knew I wanted to go home.

But it was the tipping point. If I were asked to look back and pick a time and place at which losing felt inevitable, at which the population turned from cautious supporters to cynics, that would be it. It was the day that I realized that winning from here on out meant simply not losing.

I’m sure every soldier has a story of where his or her war begins and where it ends. This one is mine.

Don Gomez is an Army officer. You can follow him on Twitter: @dongomezjr.

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” That’s what Bertrand Russell said.

I didn’t know what he meant when I was 20 and heading to war. Now, at the age of 28, it makes too much sense. A sense that I am left but that my father is gone.

My dad was a soldier once, too. He was drafted and shipped to West Germany in 1953. The worst thing that ever happened to him was that a German soldier broke his nose with the end of a rifle. It was the only war story he’d ever tell.

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Kate Hoit's father at the Albany County Nursing Home in 2006.Credit Kate Hoit

My father is still breathing and still talking about that jerk who shattered his nose. But Alzheimer’s eats away at his brain. He forgets my name. But he remembers our wars. Except for mine.

Throughout my deployment to Iraq in 2005, we exchanged e-mails. Tap-tap on a keyword. Words with no emotion and no context.

Jan. 4, 2005:

How are you? Mom and I ate at the Fountain last night. We showed Pat and Nancy your picture with Robin Williams. Pat said if you keep this up you’ll be in Hollywood! Oh, by the way, Mom and I got new bathrobes last night, finally! Mom got a pink one and mine’s plaid! Hope things stay quite there but with the elections coming up I doubt it. You are our “pride and joy.” Love you always and always.

Love you so very much,
Dad

A plaid bathrobe? He talked about things that I didn’t know how to care about anymore. Young Iraqi children ran around me naked with swollen feet, dusty, thirsty — everything suddenly seemed trivial, including plaid bathrobes.

These days, watching the old men with soft white hair walk around Washington in their khakis, crisp white polos and loafers — I see him. Thinking he might be coming back. I smile for a moment. And sometimes I wonder: if I had cared more about what he was going through, would he still be here, mentally? Maybe not.

March 14, 2005:

Dad is O.K. He just has a stomach virus. Needs rest. Not to worry and stay focused. He’ll be fine.

Love and miss you,
Mom

It’s funny to read this e-mail now, because my mom was such an awful liar. I tried to pull it out of her.

March 14, 2005:

Mom, if anything’s up tell me. I’m not playing games. Whatever it is, it won’t stress me out anymore then you not telling me what’s going on. Understand? So, please just let me know. O.K.?

Love you!

It was a secret. My dad’s mysterious illness. My mom’s inability to communicate. My hopelessness in trying to understand the impact of my war on them. We were all misfiring. There was no connection between any of us. All we had were encoded e-mails and short phone calls.

March 24, 2005:

No stroke, no cancer. When you lose so much weight from too much drinking and not eating, your electrolytes and vitamins are all off. It affects your muscles – that’s why Dad’s walking is such a problem. Dr. B. said Dr. L. talked to Dad today. He said Dad is in a very depressive state. But that can be solved with meds. He just HAS to get a grip. I never knew this [your deployment] would affect him this way.

Always,
Mom

“Get a grip.” What a strange thought. Iraq was falling apart. My dad’s memories of us, our life were all fading away. My mom was in denial. Get a grip. What a beautiful idea.

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Ms. Hoit and her father in 2013.Credit Kate Hoit

May 3, 2005:

Dad’s O.K., just talked to him. He sounded like himself. I guess that’s how this illness goes. Was going to go see him today but the oil light came on in the car. I didn’t want to chance it. Mike’s going to check it for me and put some gas in. I still have to learn how to do that. DON’T LAUGH.

Always,
Mom

And I laughed. I laughed so hard I began to cry. At the age of 56, she didn’t know how to pump gas. I cried because of how ridiculous this was and I cried because I knew she was all alone.

May 5, 2005:

Dad is in his new room now. He’s in room 37. I talked to him a little while ago and he doesn’t like it. Nothing I can do about it.

Love,
Mom

There was nothing I could do, either.

When I boarded the C-130 to come home in 2005, I peered out the window and gave Iraq the middle finger. I’m not sure why. I wasn’t ready to go home. I could envision the hell I’d be walking into: a gasoline-soaked mother and a father who could remember his war, but possibly not my own.

I walked off the plane. I weaved through people like I was on speed. I was home. It didn’t feel right — because I knew my dad was no longer there.

Kate Hoit works in the Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs at the Department of Veterans Affairs. She is also an M.A. candidate in nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a Tillman Military Scholar. She deployed to Iraq in 2004 as a photojournalist. Follow her on Twitter.

Andrew P. Clifford, pictured in Baghdad in 2003, was a machine-gunner with the Marines in Iraq.Credit Courtesy Andrew P. Clifford

I usually forget about most dreams right after I wake, but I never forget the ones that involve combat. I collect those dreams and save them, locking them in a fortified mental safe I rarely open because the images may turn into nightmares. The war dreams are the pictures I never took. They are the souvenirs of war, the thoughts that continue to humble me. Some people might think that remembering such experiences would have destructive side effects. But for me, the dreams are a reminder of how valuable life is.

Driving Into War: March 24, 2003

As our convoy of Marines from of Regimental Combat Team 1 pushed forward, I saw an Iraqi man in the distance walking alone on the side of the road. He was wearing what looked like a long red and orange scarf. But as our truck drew closer, I realized that it was not a scarf. The man was carrying a dead body over his right shoulder. The body was covered in blood that was dripping onto the man’s calves.

The dead man had dark eyes, a scruffy black beard and a bullet hole through his shoulder. The man carrying his body gazed right at me, as if he wanted to hurt me in some way. He spit on the ground and adjusted the body over his shoulder. At that moment, I realized that, to him, I was the enemy. I was thinking that both of them could have been in the Iraqi military and just changed out of their uniforms. It was the first dead body that I had ever seen.

As we drew closer to the battlefield, I could smell it in the air. It smelled like some weird combination of burned flesh and gunpowder. I could hear and feel the pounding of artillery hitting the ground. I didn’t know if the Iraqi Republican Guard or the United States-led coalition forces were doing the firing. In the distance Cobra helicopters were hovering like a pack of black crows, firing rounds from the sky. They looked like dragons breathing fire on a medieval town. We were getting closer to war. Reality began to sit in.

Gharraf: March 25, 2003

After driving through the night, at daylight we crossed a bridge over the Euphrates River. The water was pitch black. There were blown-up Soviet tanks facing to the south, surrounded by beautiful palm trees. I began to see disabled vehicles, some military and some civilian, on both sides of the highway. I even saw a disabled Abrams tank, something that my ignorant mind at the time thought was indestructible. I began to hear popping in the distance, like the noise you hear down the block on July 4. But this popping was not fireworks; it was bullets and grenades.

We were moving through the city of Nasiriya. The winds began to pick up, and sand clouded my vision. Nature was getting involved with the war. My ski goggles were shattered by the sandstorm. Near the front, Marines were in the prone position, shooting into the distance. Those Marines had dark stares on their faces, stares that came from an overload of horror, excitement, adrenaline, lack of food and lack of rest. It was a stare I was beginning to develop. Field grade officers had their 9-millimeter pistols drawn, radios in their other hands. I saw a machine-gunner firing .50-caliber rounds from on top of a Humvee into a cement building. Enemy muzzle flashes popped up from the windows. The concrete blocks were turning into rubble.

All of a sudden, things slowed down. We were under attack. I could hear rounds whizzing by. Marines yelled, “Contact front, contact front!” We were taking small-arms fire from about 300 meters to the west. I could hear the sound of bullets ricocheting off our vehicle. I could see the muzzle flashes directly ahead. The Marines to my right and left looked at me. We confirmed with that look that the moment was real and that it was time for us to attack the people who were trying to kill us.

As we jumped off the truck, my heart was beating abnormally fast, pounding like a drum. But strangely my breathing was smooth and calm, just as the marksman instructors at boot camp had trained us. “Inhale, exhale, focus on the front sight tip, slow, steady, squeeze.” In a chaotic moment, the first time I was a target, I reverted back to that training. And the training is what kept us alive.

We landed feet first in mud, about 15 inches of it. It was thick like cement and smelled of feces. For a second I stood there. I heard a zipping noise go right past me and then I saw a spark. I was being shot at. I freed my right foot from the muck and began running for cover. I fired rounds while on my stomach. I pushed myself up with my left hand and rose from the prone position. I was knocked down by the wind. I got up again, moved two feet, and fell again. I was back on my stomach with no cover this time but with a panoramic view of Marines engaged in the firefight. I saw one Marine fire a grenade into the window of a cement building. I saw team leaders yelling at Marines. I got back up, grabbed my black ammunition bag full of 7.62 rounds and began moving toward the sound of the guns.

I began to get angry. I was mad at the weather, mad at the people who were trying to kill me, mad at the people who were trying to kill my comrades. I got up and began to fire. I looked into the iron sight of my rifle, focused on a muzzle flash and repeatedly pulled the trigger. And then, suddenly, my executive officer yelled, “Cease fire, cease fire!” The firefight was over.

I was tired. My heart was beating rapidly and I wanted it to beat normally. There were Marines lying on their stomachs all around me, their weapons facing out. I couldn’t help but notice that there were smiles on their faces. One would think they were sick to be smiling after a gun battle.

But it was the first time many of them had seen combat. We had been training for months for the moment that had just passed. The training proved good because we had survived the test, the test of real bullets.

“Clifford, you all right?” my squad leader asked. Calmly, robotically, looking off into the distance, I replied, “I am good to go, Sergeant.”

The rest of my squad were standing in a tight-knit circle, trying to keep warm. We had all made it.

Andrew Clifford was a machine-gunner in Iraq in 2003, part of the first Marine Corps infantry reserve unit to deploy. He received a master’s degree in public administration from Golden Gate University in 2012 and currently works as a police officer in San Francisco.

On the battlefield, individuals with language skills are rare and highly prized. “Your interpreter is way more important than your weapon,” explained Cory Schulz, an Army major embedded with Afghan troops. Indeed, an adept interpreter can help a soldier avoid the need to use a weapon in the first place. An interpreter in the field not only translates sentences from one language into another, but can help identify a local accent or tell soldiers what the graffiti on a wall means while peering out of a moving vehicle. Small actions like these, while not technically even part of the interpreter’s job description, often protect troops by keeping them out of harm’s way.

However, interpreters do not always receive a similar level of protection from the militaries they serve. They soon become prime targets for death threats and assassination attempts. Interpreters in Iraq were 10 times more likely to be killed than the American troops they supported. Accurate numbers of interpreters killed in battle in both wars are difficult to obtain, but most sources agreed that at least 300 were killed in Iraq, and at least 80 in Afghanistan. When the soldiers go home, interpreters and their families often have no choice but to flee, becoming refugees or asylum seekers. A visa can make the difference between life and death.

By comparison, the United States sent more than two million troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007 and 2008, a special immigrant visa program was created to allow Iraqi and Afghan interpreters to receive visas. The number of visas was limited to 500 per year, but was reduced to just 50 per year starting in 2009. So, a total of 1,200 visas were authorized under this program from 2007 through 2012. Visas can be obtained under other programs, but an enormous backlog of interpreters still waits to receive an answer.

Meanwhile, language-skilled individuals are in high demand and low supply in the United States. Many government agencies face a severe shortage of skilled linguists for “critical languages,” those deemed important for defense and intelligence activities. These languages include Arabic, a dialect of which is spoken in Iraq, and Pashto and Dari, which are spoken in Afghanistan.

The government’s lack of translators is longstanding. On September 10, 2001, Al Qaeda operatives warned, “Tomorrow is zero hour,” and “The match is about to begin.” It is not clear whether these intercepted messages, which were spoken in Arabic, were a reference to the impending attacks. But regardless, they were not translated until September 12. Similarly, the F.B.I. failed to review 7.2 million files collected by counterterrorism investigators from 2006 to 2008, due in great part to a lack of translation resources.

Government agencies continue to struggle to find enough people who can teach critical languages to diplomats, translate documents, and even do monolingual work like scanning news media or listening to recordings in another language for intelligence purposes. The agencies face several barriers. The number of candidates who speak these languages and live in the United States is limited. Military contractors can offer higher salaries to language-skilled workers, leaving the government with even fewer potential recruits. Many people cannot obtain the required security clearances, and not everyone wants to relocate or work for the Defense Department.

In short, the government has reduced the number of visas for interpreters who are skilled in some of the very languages it requires for national security but cannot successfully recruit from its existing population. President Obama plans to overhaul the immigration system in the coming months. The new legislation reportedly will enable “highly skilled foreigners” to remain in the country.

But will the list of desired skills include language skills? The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has data showing that translation and interpreting are among the fastest-growing professions in the country. The language services market supports not only government agencies, but the manufacturing and automotive sectors, the health care industry and many other important areas of the economy.

Many military interpreters have language skills that could instantly be put to use here at home in the public and private sectors. Granted, not every interpreter in Iraq or Afghanistan is perfectly bilingual. Most never had the opportunity to perfect their skills in an English-speaking country. However, even in the cases of interpreters with relatively limited English, it would likely be faster to help them improve their basic English than to teach an Anglophone to speak Arabic or Dari from scratch.

Not all interpreters deserve visas. There have been several cases of interpreters who misrepresented their abilities or even lied about the languages they spoke, putting troops’ lives at risk. Others have been guilty of abandoning troops, stealing and other charges. However, there are thousands of interpreters out there who served bravely alongside American troops and who do deserve visas. Their lives were at risk when they served, and they remain at risk today.

Helping those interpreters is simply the right thing to do, but adding more language-skilled individuals to the American workforce would also benefit our government and economy. The wars in which we are engaged today and the battlefields on which we carry them out are changing. If anything, the need for linguistic preparedness is only intensifying. For that very reason, perhaps if we pay closer attention to our country’s language strategy and create immigration policies that support it, those interpreters and translators can prevent us from getting into situations where we need to use weapons in the first place – just as they do on the battlefield.

The unofficial marker for summer’s beginning is upon us, and beyond the noise of summer barbecues, some will take time to honor the service members who fought and died in our nation’s wars. As a veteran of a recent war, I feel it is important to look past the general niceties spouted over heroic service, and to truly reflect upon the costs of war, and to honor the complexities of the situation that we soldiers are fighting in.

As a former platoon leader in the Third Brigade of the storied First Cavalry Division, I consider all those we lost over our 15-month deployment to Iraq: the 110 killed, and the 400 injured — a number that includes me.

During a foot patrol in the city of Baquba, my boot caught a tripwire and ignited an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., just yards behind me. I was immediately medevacked to Iraq’s theater hospital. In and out of consciousness in the emergency room, I recall my brigade commander, Colonel Sutherland, arriving to see me, reaching over me and placing a Purple Heart medal on my pillow.

I struggle to take pride in my Purple Heart. A complex medal awarded to the combat-injured, both those who survive and those who are killed, the Purple Heart is largely seen as a medal to be proud of, representing a righteous, enemy-tested capacity to survive, endure, and sacrifice. I certainly see the honor in such an award. It sparks feelings of pride in my soldiers’ and my willingness to sacrifice, and I recognize the honor in receiving the oldest active award the military offers.

Still, as a survivor, I also see the 110 lives lost, some of whose names I can no longer fully recall but who were also awarded the same medal. I see the civilians I failed to protect while overseeing the security of Iraqi cities. But most of all, I see the innocent Iraqi family that I inadvertently killed: the mother, father and all their children huddled in fear inside a house I destroyed, tearing innocent life from the earth. As I stare down at the image of General Washington on my Purple Heart, I see the faces of the children, etched deep into my memory, staring back at me.

While I am proud of my soldiers’ and my achievements, I cannot let go of the people I failed, and I do not want their deaths to go unhonored or to be forgotten. By carrying the Purple Heart, whether as a lapel pin or as an image engraved on a coffee mug, I remind myself of a tragedy that I am ultimately responsible for — a violation against humanity.

When you see my Purple Heart, you see my sacrifice, but I see and feel much more. I see the people I killed, the civilians I failed to protect, and I am reminded that there will be no Purple Heart for them.

Shannon P. Meehan, captain (retired), United States Army, is a communications specialist at Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families. Mr. Meehan, a Truman fellow, is the co-author of “Beyond Duty: Life on the Frontline in Iraq,” written with Roger Thompson.

Andrea Bruce for The New York TimesA boy sits in debris from Speicher Base near Sokur, Iraq, which housed American troops until they left the site on Oct. 20.

Andrew E. Kramer reports on the lingering effects of the American presence in Sokur, Iraq, a village many Iraqis have nicknamed Traitor Town.

Years ago, the residents of this town formed an alliance with the Americans who had moved into the airport and renamed it Speicher Base.

Nearly every young man in the town worked at the base, making this place an illustrative, if extreme, example of the unfortunate turn of fate for Iraqis who took jobs with the United States military during the nearly nine-year war, and who are now being left behind.

A United States visa program for them is stalled in red tape, while the Iraqi government has no formal program to help. Though these workers were laid off months ago, they are now, finally and irrevocably, deprived of their job opportunities, off the bases and being shunned, or worse.

The question comes at a crucial time for the country. Eight years after the United States invaded and tried to install a democratic government, Iraqis are still struggling with a steady stream of violence while trying to establish their own identity.

Iraqis, not surprisingly, have a wide range of emotions about the issue and many say there is no good choice, reflecting their frustration with both the Iraqi and American governments.

Some fear that the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr will follow through on his promises to rearm his militia if any American forces remain. Others believe that if the United States forces leave, the country will fall back into a sectarian war or become overrun by its neighboring countries — particularly Iran.Read more…

With cars banned ahead of a day of protests, the streets were mostly deserted except for military and police vehicles. But that did not stop more than a thousand people from gathering in this city’s Tahrir Square.

They came on foot, Shiites and Sunnis, Christians, senior citizens, teenagers and children, most of them there to support the freedoms that Iraqis have fought so hard to grasp over the past eight years.

I, too, made an hour-long trek to Tahrir Square so I could report on the protests for The Times.

One of the first people I encountered after arriving at about 10 a.m. was Wesal Esmail, a 32-year-old woman who walked two hours to be there.

“I have never felt so free in my life,” she said. “Maliki cannot stop me. Maliki cannot take this away from me,” she said, referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

By noon, things became heated.

A group of protesters gathered at the nearby Jumhuriya Bridge, which runs over the Tigris to the Green Zone, and began trying to tear down concrete blast walls that had been set up shortly before the protest.

I followed them, and spoke to a 25-year-old named Ali, who helped to rip down the walls. “Maliki thinks that he can stop us with his walls,” he told me. “It’s all he has.”

After several attempts, the walls toppled with a boom, and the protesters surged onto the bridge. But there they confronted another wall – this one a barrier of security forces blocking their way across the bridge.

The protesters tried to push their way through the security forces, but were prevented. So they began throwing stones.

Sensing trouble, I turned around and tried to head back to Tahrir Square. But before I could reach the end of the bridge, security forces began to attack the protesters with sticks and cables.

The protesters ran toward me. I panicked, afraid that I would be trampled by the crowds or attacked by the police. I flattened myself against the wall as the crowd ran past me. As the police ran toward us, clubs in hand, I shouted in Arabic: “Don’t hit me.”

As I ran for safety, I was hit in the back by a rock thrown by a protester. Finally, I made it back to Tahrir Square and the public garden where protesters regrouped in a calmer spot they jokingly called the Ministry of Resting.

They vented their anger as they planned their next moves.

“Is this the democracy that Obama said we brought to Iraq, is this freedom that Maliki talks about?” said Haider Ali, 28, who was beaten by security forces.

“We are planning to stay alive, we are not going to leave unless they provide what we want,” Hamid Ahmed, a 28-year-old unemployed engineer, said while his friends gave him a leg massage.

Those quieter moments of shared freedom and humor ended abruptly as the security forces moved in to clear the area, setting off sound bombs, firing water cannons and wielding clubs against protesters. I saw a soldier hit a 12-year-old who had tripped on a skein of barbed wire.

Right now, Tahrir Square is empty, cleared of demonstrators. But life will return.

“We left our souls there, and we will return again, the sun will still rise again on Baghdad,” said Thaeir Ali, as he made his way home.
Duraid Adnan is an Iraqi journalist who works for The New York Times in Baghdad.

Updated | 5:49 p.m. As my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported, a senior American military official confirmed on Monday that a graphic video released by the Web site WikiLeaks.org, which shows an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver during a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, is authentic.

One of the whistle-blowing group’s founders, Julian Assange, explained and defended the decision to release the graphic, disturbing video shot from the helicopter during interviews in Washington on Monday with Al Jazeera and Russia Today.

In a statement released by the White House Sunday morning, President Obama praised Iraqis’ resolve as they defied a wave of bombings across the country and turned out to vote in parliamentary elections that are seen as a crucial test of Iraq’s democracy nearly seven years after the American-led ouster of Saddam Hussein.

“I congratulate the people of Iraq for casting their ballots in this important parliamentary election. I have great respect for the millions of Iraqis who refused to be deterred by acts of violence, and who exercised their right to vote today. Their participation demonstrates that the Iraqi people have chosen to shape their future through the political process.

“I commend the Iraqi government and Iraqi Security Forces for providing security at nearly 50,000 voting booths at more than 8,000 polling stations across Iraq. We mourn the tragic loss of life today, and honor the courage and resilience of the Iraqi people who once again defied threats to advance their democracy. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi poll workers contributed to the effort, as well as domestic party and civil society observers. Iraqi citizens around the world also participated in these elections, including Iraqis living in the U.S. who voted in Arlington, Va., Chicago, Dallas, Dearborn, Mich., Nashville, Phoenix, San Diego, and San Francisco.

“The important work of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) will continue in the days to come as it counts ballots, tabulates results and investigates complaints. We also salute the invaluable assistance provided by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI).”

Mr. Obama was to make further comments on the elections in a 3 p.m. press briefing.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesChief conductor and director of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, Karim Wasfi, runs rehearsal. Baghdad, Iraq, July 8, 2009.

BAGHDAD – It was achievement enough that the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra managed to survive the darkest days of the war, when it struggled for supplies and electricity, when its members fled for safety abroad and those who remained practiced in secret for fear of offending militants who considered music un-Islamic.

“We were fighting against the impending doom simply by functioning,” the orchestra’s charismatic director and chief conductor, Karim Wasfi, said the other day.

Now the orchestra finds itself “out of the bottleneck,” as Mr. Wasfi put it, facing challenges in a post-conflict society that are no less daunting for being less immediately life-threatening.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesTuqa Saad Al Waeli warms up prior to rehearsal.

The orchestra is fighting for its budget, only now beginning to solicit corporate sponsorship in a country where the state once controlled all (and still does, if chaotically). Mr. Wasfi is lobbying to build an opera house in a country where electricity, clean water and garbage removal remain scarce services.

Hardest of all, the orchestra is trying to recreate a shared cultural life – “the concept of Iraq,” he said – that decades of isolation, international sanctions, war and sectarianism have thoroughly shattered.

“Iraq has achieved a lot, but it’s not yet on a solid, concrete foundation,” Mr. Wasfi said. “Stability is not related just to people not killing each other.”

The New York Times’s Edward Wong wrote movingly about the orchestra nearly three years ago , a time when sectarian bloodshed seemed to threaten its very mission: to give a troubled nation succor through music.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesStudents and teachers practicing.

Even with today’s vastly improved security, the orchestra’s home in a former royal concert hall near the edge of the Old City still feels like an oasis of civility and cosmopolitanism – something evident from a lone trumpeter practicing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to the full orchestra rehearsing Dvorak’s “New World” symphony.

At the height of the sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007 the orchestra dwindled to just 43 members; violence and checkpoints meant as few as 17 made it to some rehearsals.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesDua’a Majid Hussien Al Azawi, a young oboe player in the orchestra, prior to rehearsal.

There are 85 members now, including 13 who recently returned from self-exile in Syria and the United Arab Emirates. (During rehearsal Mr. Wasfi chided one whose playing was off, “Are you thinking of Syria?”) The dearth of musicians also forced the orchestra to find and train aspiring young people; the youngest member is only 15. Mr. Wasfi dreams of building a full philharmonic orchestra with 120 players.

Its foundation seems firm at last. The Ministry of Culture pays the members’ salaries, the equivalent of roughly $1,000 a month. Members carry their instruments openly into the concert hall. The orchestra has 14 concerts planned in the coming year, as well as 10 chamber performances, around the country.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesNubar Bashtikian prepares for rehearsal.

The most recent was July 16 in Sulaimaniya, in the northern Kurdish region, sponsored by Asiacell, a mobile telephone company, which will cover its travel costs. The playlist included Verdi, Liszt, Strauss, Webber, Gershwin and Dvorak, as well as Iraqi classical music.

For the first time, Mr. Wasfi has even negotiated performances in the next year in the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, where conservative religious values still dominate. “There’s no indecent music,” he said, explaining his delicate negotiations with religious leaders there.

Photographs by Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York TimesThe Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra rehearses under the direction of Karim Wasfi.

Iraq remains a troubled place, but the orchestra should be a bridge to a better future, as he explained, “when we have an opera house, when attending a performance and opening a gallery is part of your normal life, when political leaders fight in the parliament and not in the streets, when they set aside their differences and attend a concert.”

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At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. The New York Times's award-winning team provides insight — and answers questions — about combatants on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle.

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